While consoles are generally less powerful than most gaming PCs, they often perform significantly better relative to their hardware. The main reason behind this is that consoles have a unique low overhead operating system that allows them to get the absolute most out of their hardware. On a PC a lot of the system’s potential is bogged down by other things like the operating system, complex APIs and extremely complex driver packages. AMD thinks it has found a way around this with its new Mantle API. AMD claims Mantle will give PCs a low-level API similar to consoles that will allow all AMD GCN GPUs (so HD 7000 and RX 2XX) to perform dramatically better in Mantle API optimised games. The Mantle API allows access to more GPU features, new rendering techniques and reduces CPU overhead.

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steam OS and nvidia announced a partnership today…….MANTLE and GCN ensures windows had a new API to compete

Skidmarks

We have to wait and see how this pans out.

Wayne

This is pretty epic from AMD, keep up the good work. Sticking with your single GPU’s for the time being!
The closer we can get to the physical hardware the better, keep up the good work on the driver/api area AMD. It’s been a bit of a shortcoming for ATI since the 9800 days!

Better performance = better competition = profit for consumers :).

Andrew Fox

Interesting but not sure how they plan to get this running on NVIDIA hardware? At this stage developers wanting to use Mantle will also have to develop on DirectX for NVIDIA users, this means performing the programming work for rendering twice. I don’t see Mantle being very popular if developers have to do a lot of work to support it and doesn’t even run on half the market. It is definitely good to see a strong DirectX competitor though.